I interviewed Huang three weeks ago. Now Nvidia faces a world without him

I was the last person at CNBC to do a live broadcast interview with Jensen Huang. 

At the time, Huang still seemed untouchable. But weeks later, Nvidia is confronting a question investors hadn’t had to confront in more than 30 years: What does the company look like without him?  

I sat down with the company founder on Oct. 22 at Nvidia‘s GTC event in Berlin, Germany, just weeks before he admitted to an affair with a woman that U.S. intelligence alleges could be a spy for China.

“Jensenmania,” as I like to call it — which had come to characterize the CEO’s appearances — was in full force at the Berlin event. The Nvidia merchandise store featured clothing with Huang’s face on it, huge cheers erupted when he appeared on stage, and attendees were doing their best to secure a picture with the Nvidia founder. 

Huang had somewhat of a rockstar persona with a fandom to match in every city he visited around the world. In 2025, I followed Huang around on his visit to Europe. At an event in London, an attendee who was eagerly waiting to catch a glimpse of Huang compared the Nvidia boss to “Iron Man,” referencing the popular character of the Marvel superhero and tech billionaire inventor Tony Stark. 

These moments that I experienced really embodied what Huang had become – a larger-than-life personality who was central to the excitement around artificial intelligence. Less CEO, more AI hype man, evangelical about the technology and its transformative power. 

He had the credentials to back it up. Since he co-founded Nvidia in the early 90s, Huang helped shape the company from a startup taking on incumbents to a dominant player for AI chips. Over the last three decades, he saw the shifts coming, investing to turn what were initially chips designed for rendering gaming graphics – GPUs – into general-purpose AI computing semiconductors, along with the software that gave Nvidia its strong position. 

But perhaps it’s the right time for someone new, such an operator-type leader. We’ve seen it before at tech giants like Apple or Alphabet, where visionary leaders step down, and new CEOs take over, bringing the businesses to new heights — at least if you look at the share prices. Sure, they may not be the flamboyant founders, but they innovate in other ways.  

Nvidia’s roadmap of new…